Forty years ago Day of the Dead came a month early in Mexico City. And plenty of people in Los Angeles will not forget.
In 1968 Mexican soldiers opened fire on a peaceful protest in a large plaza in Mexico City's Tlatelolco neighborhood. Imagine the Kent State killings of 1970 taking place in New York City's Washington Square at a mass protest organized by students at NYU, MIT and some elite public high schools, in which organized labor joined in. The big difference, scores of people, not four, were shot dead.
The events pistol-whipped Mexican society and politics, but not enough to immediately loosen the ruling party's grip on power.
An aunt on my mother's side who lived in San Pedro for years bore the burden of Tlatelolco. She'd left Mexico but couldn't leave behind the grief that one of her sons never came home after October 2, 1968. Her San Pedro apartment in the projects had a view of the slow ships and sail boats entering the harbor.
Growing up, 32 year old Edith Hernandez - an employee at a Pasadena architectural firm - heard lots of stories about the Tlatelolco massacre. Her father was a young vocational student who'd started a job at the national telephone company and was pissed off at government repression and narrow opportunity for many young mexicanos to join the middle class.
While studying at Mexico City's Instituto Politécnico, Edith Hernandez remembers the anger she felt every October 2nd. How could a government kill its own people, let alone students, she wondered. Hernandez, other Mexican immigrants, and plenty of assimilated Mexican Americans staged an afternoon-long ritual against forgetting in front of the Mexican consulate in MacArthur Park last Saturday. The collection of radical and left leaning Los Angeles activists staged an afternoon of music, agit-prop theater and poetry.
From Mexico City, my cousin - the one who works in the marketing department of a transnational food company - emailed me about the Tlatelolco massacre on the anniversary last week: "I won't forget it. It took me three hours to get to work because of all the street protests!"
Photo Credit: Ramon Cavallo; AFP/Getty Images
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yes, we forget, or we pretend to.... our past has become a nuisance. It takes a Mexican in L.A to remember!
An awful, literal day of the dead!
I think about my parent's generation who left trouble back home (across the water in my case) and now their kids are talking about going back to the mother county if the election goes bad. Plus ca change, right?